I am one of the millions of people who has recently enjoyed a 24-minute video escape into happiness—also known as Paul McCartney Carpool Karaoke. The video is fun, it is revealing, it is touching, and it stays on your mind for days to come. That’s lovely in and of itself. But besides Penny Lane, the…
Dear Madeleine, I manage a large team of accountants and other kinds of finance experts. We recently posted a job for a senior budget analyst. One of the applicants is a person who was in the finance department a couple of years back. I wasn’t his boss, but I wasn’t impressed with him then and…
Dear Madeleine, I manage a fairly large group in engineering. My team has a good reputation with the rest of the company and works well together. Except for one person. I have one direct report that I just don’t know what to do with. “K” has always been a little bit prickly and unpredictable, but…
Addressing low trust in a relationship is a challenging issue. As soon as the “t” word—trust—is mentioned, emotions start to rise, defensiveness climbs, and people begin to feel uneasy about where the conversation is headed. When I conduct workshops on building trust, participants often ask me for advice about how they can tell someone they…
Dear Madeleine, I have just been promoted. This has been my career ambition and it has been a long time coming. I have been leading a large team of individual contributors and will now be managing three other managers in addition to some individual contributors. Two of these managers had been my peers and…
One of the most powerful underpinnings of high impact coaching is the match between the client and coach. This match is based on many things and is both a science and an art. Here is how we successfully match clients with coaches at Blanchard. We know our coaches—their strengths, their style, and who fits the…
Ask yourself this question: If I gave my employees a choice between receiving a pay raise or me becoming a better boss, which would they choose? Chances are you’d probably say your employees would choose a pay raise, right? I mean, after all, who wouldn’t want more money? Taking a few liberties with the classic…
Building trust in the workplace is much like growing plants in a garden; you have to sow the seeds. If you don’t sow it, you can’t grow it. It doesn’t matter how rich the soil is in your garden, how much sunlight it receives, or how often you water, if you don’t sow the seeds, you…
“An Implosion of Trust”—That’s the headline of the executive summary of Edelman’s 2017 Trust Barometer. Their annual trust survey and report goes on to cite grim statistics about the state of trust in the world: Trust in government, business, media, and NGOs declined broadly over the last year, the first time this has happened with all…
One of the biggest challenges leadership, learning, and talent development professionals face when they propose a new initiative is convincing their CEO of the financial impact of the proposed initiative. Without a clear sense of the positive financial impact, it’s easy for a leader to dismiss a new proposal as being too disruptive, too expensive,…